The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy

by Andrew Keen

Nicholas Brealey Publishing £12.99, pp240

Bloggers are notoriously touchy so it's unlikely they'll respond with restraint to the comparison that opens Andrew Keen's polemic. Adapting the 'infinite monkey theorem', Keen, a British media commentator based in California, updates the typewriting primates to internet users. These 'monkeys' are not producing Shakespeare, they're deluging us with 'everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels'.

It's not a fashionable statement in this super-connected Web 2.0 age, when Goliaths in every sector of the media are groaning and creaking before a billion interconnected young Davids. We are in thrall to Google and Wikipedia, addicted to Facebook and YouTube, but Keen, who was a bright-eyed Silicon Valley prospector before the dotcom crash, is making no apologies for his loss of faith. It isn't simply the flood of banality that worries him: it's the prospect of our cultural economies collapsing under the weight. He doom-mongers rather indulgently at times, but his horror story is still compelling.

A lot of Keen's fears are familiar and valid. The music industry is on its knees and fledgling bands do suffer when fans download their music for free. We can never be quite sure about what we read on Wikipedia. We worry about Google abusing our confidences.

It's the way Keen ties these concerns together that makes this book worth taking seriously, and even if you'd like to punch the man in the nose for calling you a monkey, few can dispute the need to critique this enormously powerful tool which we like to believe is fully in our control. In many cases that control is a two-way circuit, and no matter how democratic Web 2.0 appears, its lawless landscape leaves us, the users, exposed to all kinds of manipulations and abuses.

Unscrupulous corporations, scam artists and smut peddlers rank high on Keen's offenders list. It's when he takes a moral standpoint that his grip on the argument loosens. Many complaints are valid - stronger regulations should exist to protect children from adult content and sexual predators - but the screechiness of tone begins to grate.

As a polemicist, Keen is committed to the worst-case scenario, but what's absent is an acknowledgement of the many wonders of Web 2.0. Not every blogger is a high-school dropout and not every YouTube video is devoid of cultural value. There is well-informed, well-written discourse out there if you know where to find it.

Keen, who maintains a blog himself, refers to the web's noisy chorus as 'digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated'. He need not worry about his own voice being drowned out. The Cult of the Amateur will certainly hit a nerve, and hopefully some of its right-headed solutions will be acted upon, but the babble, we can be certain, is only going to increase.